Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

222 Pages·2020·4.489 MB·English

by  Nayanika Mathur

Crooked Cats
AnimAl lives
Jane C. Desmond, Series Editor; Barbara J. King, Associate Editor for Science;
Kim Marra, Associate Editor
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Crooked Cats
Beastly encounters in the Anthropocene
nAyAnikA mATHUR
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Published 2021
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isBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 77189- 2 (cloth)
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DOi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226772080.001.0001
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: mathur, nayanika, author.
Title: Crooked cats : beastly encounters in the Anthropocene /
nayanika mathur.
Other titles: Animal lives (University of Chicago. Press)
Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | series: Animal lives |
includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lCCn 2020056572 | isBn 9780226771892 (cloth) |
isBn 9780226771922 (paperback) | isBn 9780226772080 (ebook)
subjects: lCsH: Felidae—Behavior. | Animal attacks—india. |
Human-animal relationships.
Classification: lCC Ql737.C23 m2768 2021 | DDC 599.75—dc23
lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056572
♾ This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/nisO Z39.48-1 992
(Permanence of Paper).
To Tapsi
छोटी बहन

COnTenTs
Prologue: Of Two Reigns of Terror / ix
introduction: The Beastly Tale of the leopard of Gopeshwar / 1
1. Crooked Becomings / 29
2. murderous looks / 55
3. The Cute killer / 73
4. A Petition to kill / 79
5. The leopard of Rudraprayag versus shere khan / 95
6. Big Cats in the City / 105
7. entrapment / 127
8. Three Beastly Tales to Conclude / 153
Acknowledgments / 165
Glossary / 169
Notes / 171
Bibliography / 189
Index / 201

PROlOGUe
Of Two Reigns of Terror
“Apologies for the apocalypse” signs off an email as my university goes into
a lockdown to stave off the coronavirus pandemic. in more muted terms,
other messages note that this is an “extraordinary time.” most struggle to
find an analogous moment in living memory. strangely enough, for me
this period of quarantine— in which i am putting the final touches to this
book— is eerily reminiscent of the very period in my life that led to the birth
of Crooked Cats in the first place.
“stay home, stay safe!” we are told as the pandemic silently sweeps
through the world. This is precisely the only protection that was at hand
over three months in 2006–2 007 when a leopard haunted the small Hima-
layan town of Gopeshwar in the north indian state of Uttarakhand. Then, i
had been living in Gopeshwar for my doctoral fieldwork. The leopard—o r
bagh, as it is known in Hindi— was a crooked cat, or what are popularly
known as “man- eaters.” she spread what was widely described as “a reign of
terror” in the town and surrounding villages, and killed and ate seven hu-
mans before she was herself hunted down. During this period, it was hard
for us to leave our houses other than in big groups and in broad daylight.
Before dusk fell, we would scurry home and firmly lock the doors, not dar-
ing to step out till the next day. At night we shivered with fright in our beds,
hearing— or imagining we were hearing— her beastly roar echo through the
small Himalayan town. Our lives were at risk, quite literally, if we left our
homes— a feeling that is reverberating around the United kingdom as i type
these words in late march 2020.
i laughed inwardly when i read these lines from the diary of an italian
editor under lockdown in Florence: “We live as if a predator roams outside.
And no one knows when it will tire of the hunt and move on.”1 The similar-
ities between the present european lockdown and the reign of terror of the
x / Prologue
big cat in the indian Himalaya are not just a spatial incarceration and the
unknowability of how long the situation might persist for, critical as those
aspects are. The resemblance is also in a critical feature of this moment in
the world that lies at the very heart of this project: a dawning awareness of
the intricate entanglements between spheres that are often kept apart, espe-
cially human- nonhuman relationships and planetary health, and the ways
in which a slight change in one affects the other. Consider the videos of starv-
ing monkeys in Thailand and india and deer in Japan that are behaving
oddly— fighting among one another or traveling to metro stations and
crowded traffic- filled streets in pursuance of food— due to a drop in human
tourists. Obversely, in some quarters, narratives of a resurgent nature are
dominating, with celebration of, supposedly, the return of fish to venetian
canals or dolphins to the shores of mumbai. such “digital ecological en-
counters” (Turnbull, searle, and W. Adams 2020) have led to a problematic
mode of storytelling regarding the pandemic, though the final form this
narrative will take is still to definitively congeal (n. mathur 2020).
There is a dawning recognition of how closely human and nonhuman
animals’ lives are linked. At the very same time, there is a profound uncer-
tainty to this pandemic. Was the original host of COviD- 19 a pangolin or
a bat or another animal altogether? How does this virus move around? is
there a cure for this disease, and how can we discover it? How effective will
the vaccinations be? What will become of the world once (if?) the pandemic
ends? What is the scale of the destruction it will leave in its wake? We all
seek answers to these and so many other questions and cannot really find
crystal clear responses. The many questions that the pandemic has opened
up, which may or may not be answered with time, mimic the foundationally
questioning nature of Crooked Cats. This book, too, is as much about asking
new questions as it is about answering them with certainty. it works through
the complexities and unresolvable unknowings associated with managing
and living with big cats that have gone rogue and are, inexplicably, turning
on humans.
What is becoming apparent with the pandemic is the profound difference
that political systems, state forms, and leadership styles are making to the
management of the pandemic.2 Different political, economic, and social sys-
tems are producing distinct results in the handling of seemingly the same
virus. in the pages that follow, there is an overarching interest in human-
designed, historically-m olded political systems and the critical role they play
in regulating crooked cats— what i term “the government of big cats.” This
form of nonhuman governance is akin to, but also departs in some vital ways
from, governmental regimes directed at humans. Hitherto, the governance of